"The greatest play dealing with love ever written is, without a
doubt, Romeo and Juliet," says Guy Roberts, Artistic Director
for the Austin Shakespeare Festival. "It's the greatest love story
of all time, and everyone who sees Romeo and Juliet knows what
it's like to love so much that you think you're going to kill yourself
or kill somebody else if you don't have that love in your life."

Yet,
the players and crew of the Austin Shakespeare Festival think getting
people to go out and see Shakespeare that's the hardest part.

"I think a lot of people learn early to shut down to Shakespeare,"
says Joy Farmer-Clary, who plays Juliet in this year's production of Romeo
and Juliet. "They've decided that it's hard, that it's too advanced
for them to be able to understand, they think it'll be done in a funny
accent maybe, but it's some unattainable thing that doesn't relate to
the real world today."

"Some productions are that way," says Tom Green, who plays
Lord Capulet. "boring, pontificating. Guy drives that right out of
you. He makes you earthy. He gets you down into it."

The Austin Shakespeare Festival hopes they can change that image.

"I
think that when people come to Austin Shakespeare Festival productions,
one of the thing which we pride ourselves on is that they are imminently
accessible," says Roberts. "When we begin to experience Shakespeare,
we begin to understand ourselves, and we also begin to understand what
it is to be human. To me, Shakespeare didn't write for the English class.
He never thought that his plays would be studied 400 years after his death.
He meant for his plays to be experienced in a theater."

"It's perfect. It's human emotion, human experience, put into poetry.
So, you have everyday life, which is very common, and you take that, and
you freeze-frame it into something that you can tweak and make perfect.
You add some poetry to it, you add some glamour to it, and it's just so
honest and beautiful."